Black and White and Red All Over: Colors and Categories in Pliny’s Natural History

Pliny the Elder is perhaps unique in Latin literature in the breadth and sophistication with which he uses color language for both descriptive and taxonomic purposes. Pliny deploys over 100 different color words of various kinds, in thousands of passages, to describe striking features of the natural world.
However, a noticeable pattern emerges in Pliny’s taxonomic, as opposed to his descriptive, color usage. When he is distinguishing categories of related natural objects rather than simply describing their interesting features, Pliny repeatedly reverts to a small subset of his basic color vocabulary, most frequently using niger in contrast with candidus or albus, for example, of different types of vines (1.1), grapes (14.42), figs (15.71), poplars (16.85), ivy (16.145), willows (16.177), chickpeas (18.124), lead (4.112) and many others varieties of things. Often rubens or rufus is also found in such combinations, for example, of sheep (2.230), chestnuts (15.94), seeds (19.47), or lettuce (19.125). Such color category uses are also frequent in Pliny’s sources, such as Theophrastus.
While this pattern is familiar and intuitive to us in modern English plant names -- for example, white and red oaks; black, white, or red alders -- its explanation is not simple or obvious, not least because the color terms used in the taxonomic context are often not ones that either we or Pliny would use in descriptive contexts. For example, a cicer nigrum ("black chickpea") is not black in the sense that atramentum (a black pigment) or india ink is black. Such wayward usages cause translators and commentators much consternation.
The explanation for such usages may be both biological and linguistic: biological, in the sense that human color perception has certain innate and universal properties, among them that black, white, and red are the most cognitively salient hue sensations for humans (Kay and Maffi 1999). This hypothesis is supported by the fact that these colors are the first to be encoded in the basic color lexicon of the vast majority of the world’s languages (Kay, Berlin, Maffi, et al. 2009). Furthermore, many propose that the Hering primaries (red, white, red, green, yellow, blue) are basic to both color perception and color naming according to the claims of Kay, Berlin, Maffi, et al. 2009, and also understand most colors to be fuzzy-set intersections of these basic perceptual categories (Kay, Berlin, and Merrifield 1991). We may further propose that Latin encoded these primaries in its basic color term system (with Oniga 2009; dissenters from this view are Lyons 1999 and Bradley 2009). Given these assumptions, when Pliny distinguishes, for example, between hedera nigra and hedera candida ("black ivy" and "white ivy"), I argue that nigra and candida refer respectively to the two Hering primaries -- black and white -- that intersect in this context with the assumed green hue of the plant in each case. In English, we handle the intersection of green + white or green + black with expressions like "light green" or "dark green." But Pliny can rely on his readers to infer that nigra and candida refer to the basic hues "black" and "white" only insofar as they intersect with green, and not as absolute and unmixed hue values.
Such a naming strategy is effective in contexts where speakers can rely heavily on hearers to have basic knowledge of the hues involved and thus to make the appropriate inferences to meet the informational needs of the situation. These usages thus comport with general principles of pragmatic implicature, in particular with Paul Grice's maxim of quantity: “Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange). Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.”

Works Cited

Bradley, Mark. 2009. Colour and Meaning in Ancient Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Grice, Paul. 1975. "Logic and Conversation". In Cole, P. and Morgan, J. (eds.) Syntax and Semantics, vol 3. New York: Academic Press.

Kay, Paul, Brent Berlin, and William Merrifield. 1991. "Biocultural Implications of Systems of Color Naming." Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 1:1, 12-25

Kay, Paul, and Luisa Maffi. 1999. "Color Appearance and the Emergence and Evolution of Basic Color Lexicons." American Anthropologist 101:4 . 743-60.

Kay, Paul, Brent Berlin, Luisa Maffi, William Merrifield, and Richard Cook. 2009. The World Color Survey. CSLI Publications, Stanford, California.

Lyons, John. 1999. "Color in Ancient Greek and Latin," in Alexander Borg (ed.), The Language of Color in the Mediterranean. An Anthology on Linguistic and Ethnographic Aspects of Color Terms. Almquist & Wiksell International: Stockholm, 38-75.

Oniga, Renato. 2007. "La terminologia del colore in Latino tra relativismo e universalismo." Aevum Antiquum. 7, 269-284.